Click to view Dear free software developers: Before we American nerds sit down to our turkey and mashed potatoes today, know that your creations are at the top of the list of things we're most thankful for. Whether you're an indie hacker putting out the occasional script or an employee at a giant internet company building out a webapp with millions of users or a voluntary coder contributing to an open source project, we salute you this Thanksgiving in gratitude for all the things your work enables us to do every day. Short of covering you in candied yam kisses and cranberry sauce hugs, please accept our hearty thanks for your work. We like you. We really, really like you. While our thanks goes out to ALL developers of ALL the free software we've featured on these pages, a few projects deserve special mention. On Monday we asked exactly what free software you're most thankful for, and thousands of votes later, we've boiled down the list to the top 40 or so. While we're offline for the day, feast your eyes and mouse on this prodigious list of some of the best free software we're most grateful for. Happy Thanksgiving! (Back to a more regular posting schedule tomorrow.)

The 46 Free Desktop Software Applications, Webapps, and Projects We're Most Thankful For

A note on the numbers: Mozilla Firefox took first place in this exercise in gratitude with an insanely commanding lead; in fact, Firefox got more than three times the amount of votes the second-place mention (VLC) did. Here's a chart of the top eight on the list so you can see how the votes were spread out relative to one another.

About our vote count: We (ok, I) grossly underestimated how many votes we would get on this particular post. Almost 800 comments in total—many of which contained more than half a dozen free software projects—made finishing the total count (36 pages of comments) before Thanksgiving 2011 impossible. So, this represents just over 1,100 votes, only one third of the total comments we received. This list of 40 contains all the apps that received 10 or more votes. As almost 200 mentions got only a single vote, we think that even though it's incomplete, it's closely representative of the general consensus. (You can check out our complete vote count spreadsheet here.) Our apologies for the incomplete count—lesson learned. Next time, we'll use a proper survey tool.